G. David Forney, Jr. is one of the foremost contributors to the theory and the practice of digital communications. In his 1965 doctoral thesis, he proposed the use of concatenated codes, which later became the standard for space communications. Subsequently, at Codex Corporation, a start-up company in Cambridge, MA, he designed and implemented the first commercially successful family of high-speed telephone-line modems, which later became an international standard.

In the 1970s, Dr. Forney made fundamental contributions to the theory of convolutional codes, the workhorse of most modern communication systems. In exploring the theory of such codes, he made significant connections to linear system theory, and also discovered the optimal demodulation technique for channels with intersymbol interference. In the 1980s, he made key contributions to the theory and practice of trellis-coded modulation, and of combined coding and equalization, which were used in later generations of high-speed modem standards. Most recently, he has been working on the theory of codes and systems on graphs, which provides a unified conceptual foundation for the various capacity-approaching codes that have been discovered in the last 15 years.

Dr. Forney received a B.S.E. degree, summa cum laude, from Princeton in 1961, and an Sc.D. from MIT in 1965. He then joined Codex as its 13th employee, and five years later was made a Vice President and a member of the Board of Directors. He spent a year at Stanford during 1971-72, at the invitation of Prof. Kailath, where he taught courses on information theory and coding, and wrote a highly cited paper on minimal bases in linear algebra and linear system theory. After Codex was acquired by Motorola in 1977, he became a Motorola Vice President and held various executive positions, while gradually re-engaging in research. He retired from Motorola in 1999, and is now an Adjunct Professor at MIT.

Dr. Forney has been deeply involved in the IEEE Information Theory Society. He served as its President in 1992, received its 1995 Claude E. Shannon award in 1995, and was honored in 1998 with two Golden Jubilee Paper Awards as well as a Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation. Other awards include the IEEE Thompson and Fink Prize Paper Awards, the IEEE Edison Medal, the Christopher Columbus International Communications Award, the Marconi International Fellowship, an honorary doctorate from EPFL (Switzerland), and election to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.